First Quatrain: "Although she feeds" to "tests my youth!"
Summary
McKay's poem is a 14 line "Shakespearean" sonnet about America—though we only know that from the title, as McKay never references America in the poem itself. But while the sonnet can be broken up in terms of rhyme into the form's traditional 3 quatrains and 1 final couplet, it can also be divided syntactically and semantically into 2 mirroring halves (4+3 and 3+4) that divide and reflect each other after the 7th line. The first section, though, forms a unit both in terms of rhyme and in terms of syntax and meaning, as the whole quatrain is one complete sentence that clearly expresses a single idea: the violence that America enacts upon the speaker and the fact that he loves "her" nonetheless. This opening quatrain is rich with figurative language, encapsulating through metaphor and paradox the sense that America both sustains and harms the speaker, and it also introduces the personification of America as a woman, which is the poem's most crucial conceit. Comparing the nourishment America gives him to "bread of bitterness" and her assault on his person to being bitten with "a tiger's tooth," the speaker in the same breath also admits to "loving" this paradoxical place where he spends his "youth."
Analysis
McKay signals the deep ambivalence, tensions, and paradoxes of his poem right from its first word, "although," and immediately after this word he personifies America as "she" in a nod to the sonnet tradition of addressing poems to female objects of desire. This feminization also invokes the idea of the "mother country," and of an America—as represented by the Statue of Liberty—that asks the world to give her "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses." Yet here the mother country only feeds her "youth" the "bread of bitterness," "stealing" his life away in an image of vampirism that McKay repeatedly uses to characterize white America. Crucially, the metaphor used to highlight America's violence—"tiger's tooth"—also subtly challenges the nation's own self-conception by comparing America to an "exotic," foreign animal. This striking image implicitly compares the stripes of the American flag to the stripes of the predatory tiger, suggesting that it is America who is in fact "Other" because of the inhuman and brutal way it treats its black citizens.
Despite this oppression, the speaker declares his "love" for America outright, though the phrase "I will confess" suggests some reluctance in doing so. The important fourth line brims with internal tension as the speaker simultaneously understates and magnifies his sense that America oppresses him, characterizing it as "hell" but also describing it as merely "testing" him. As critic James R. Giles argues, "test" is a peculiar word here, implying a kind of stoicism and even perhaps introducing "a note of Victorianism . . . in the idea of a 'test' that results in the attainment of true manhood." Yet this stoicism, if we want to call it that, also coexists with the righteous indignation and passionate love signaled by the exclamation point at the end of the sentence. This syntax, along with the quatrain's outpouring of figurative language, illustrates the artistically generative nature of this tense, ambivalent relationship, an idea further suggested through the paradox of a "cultured hell." While America clearly victimizes the speaker, the latter is able not only to fight back against this oppression but also to draw inspiration from it, an idea which McKay will further develop as the poem goes on.
